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> Finally and most fundamentally, a land registry is by nature a centralized registry of holdings with a legal monopoly. Why on earth would you need to use a bl

> Finally and most fundamentally, a land registry is by nature a centralized registry of holdings with a legal monopoly. Why on earth would you need to use a blockchain here, when an append-only database does the same job? Records within an append-only database running on a central server can be altered or deleted by whomever has the root password to that server. The only way to guard against that risk is to replicate and publicize the data, make sure all data modifications are cryptographically signed and valid according the logic of the application, and incorporate into each new version of the data a hash of prior versions of the data, in order to guard against data deletions. In other words, to implement a blockchain. > The hard part, you see, is defending their property rights. Local bigwig casually stomps on their land, now they need to convince the corruptible police to investigate (good luck with that when they're on the bigwig's payroll), find a lawyer willing to take this on (in exchange for what?), get the corruptible land rights registry to verify their claim, get a corruptible judge to give a true verdict, and then convince that corruptible police to carry out the verdict. If you're a poor subsistence farmer, it's nearly impossible to navigate this morass, and blockchain solves precisely zero of these problems. You have described a horribly corrupt and oppressive society. It's not what most of the developing world looks like. You are right that there is unlikely to be a technical solution to this level of oppression, except that it would be harder to implement in the first place in a society where property records were managed via a blockchain.

dastbe 4y ago
> The only way to guard against that risk is to replicate and publicize the data, make sure all data modifications are cryptographically signed and valid according the logic of the application, and incorporate into each new version of the data a hash of prior versions of the data, in order to guard against data deletions. In other words, to implement a blockchain. nothing you’ve described here requires the decentralized parts of a blockchain. there exist centralized databases that have all of these properties, and people have mentioned them in the comments.
- legutierr 4y ago
  You are quibbling with semantics. What you have quoted is the definition of a blockchain. Any "centralized" database with these properties is a blockchain, for all intents and purposes.
  - TheDong 4y ago
    A system with all those properties is a git repository containing all this data. Which would also scale to more operations per second than a block chain, is much more battle-hardened than any blockchain... And decidedly isn't a blockchain. It's just a merkle tree that can easily be replicated / updated via "git clone" / "git fetch". Your definition of a blockchain seems to be different than what most people use, though I admit a lot of blockchain advocates seem to make the definition tighter or looser depending on which is more convenient for the current argument.
    - legutierr 4y ago
      Your comment makes me believe that you don't think very highly of "blockchain advocates". But you don't seem to have much of a problem with using a replicated git repository in this manner. So what is the specific problem that you have? You just don't like the fact that blockchain data mutations are bundled into periodically-generated blocks that incorporate changes from multiple users, rather than being pushed by individual users on an ad hoc basis? Is it a problem for you that blockchain nodes maintain network connections with each other, and have a protocol for ensuring that they all remain in sync, rather than relying on individual users to pull and manually merge changes explicitly? A typical feature of religious disputes is that the smallest distinction takes on the most momentous significance. Is that not what's going on here?
      - TheDong 4y ago
        You're right that this level of pedantry isn't actually that useful. However, we're both on hacker news and thus presumably steeped in technology, which seems to turn people into pedants quite easily. I'm making the pedantic point because you're already talking specifically about tiny semantic points in this thread, and if you're going to quibble semantics, pedantry seems open. This distinction is not the one that actually matters and does not have huge significance in my frustration with blockchain advocates. To me, the large issue seems to be that people advocating for blockchain _stuff_ usually seem to be ignoring reality and trying to paint a libertarian dream that is simply entirely divorced from how real governments and societies currently function. The exact definition of blockchain doesn't matter. The use of a blockchain technology also doesn't matter (like, I don't care if my doctor is saving my records in Oracle SQL, some private blockchain, or whatever, never have cared, as long as the data is still there next time my doctor needs it, and it's compliant with legal privacy requirements). What matters is that "blockchain" always seems to be coupled with "and by using it, it will fix this social problem somehow" when that problem is inevitably social or political, not technical. I'm all for fixing these problems, but switching databases ain't it when the problem is several layers off, so it seems like at best a distraction from useful action, and at worst a grift to extract money from various entities by promising an easy solution to a difficult problem, which cannot realistically be delivered on.

dastbe 4y ago

> The only way to guard against that risk is to replicate and publicize the data, make sure all data modifications are cryptographically signed and valid according the logic of the application, and incorporate into each new version of the data a hash of prior versions of the data, in order to guard against data deletions. In other words, to implement a blockchain. nothing you’ve described here requires the decentralized parts of a blockchain. there exist centralized databases that have all of these properties, and people have mentioned them in the comments.

legutierr 4y ago
You are quibbling with semantics. What you have quoted is the definition of a blockchain. Any "centralized" database with these properties is a blockchain, for all intents and purposes.
- TheDong 4y ago
  A system with all those properties is a git repository containing all this data. Which would also scale to more operations per second than a block chain, is much more battle-hardened than any blockchain... And decidedly isn't a blockchain. It's just a merkle tree that can easily be replicated / updated via "git clone" / "git fetch". Your definition of a blockchain seems to be different than what most people use, though I admit a lot of blockchain advocates seem to make the definition tighter or looser depending on which is more convenient for the current argument.
  - legutierr 4y ago
    Your comment makes me believe that you don't think very highly of "blockchain advocates". But you don't seem to have much of a problem with using a replicated git repository in this manner. So what is the specific problem that you have? You just don't like the fact that blockchain data mutations are bundled into periodically-generated blocks that incorporate changes from multiple users, rather than being pushed by individual users on an ad hoc basis? Is it a problem for you that blockchain nodes maintain network connections with each other, and have a protocol for ensuring that they all remain in sync, rather than relying on individual users to pull and manually merge changes explicitly? A typical feature of religious disputes is that the smallest distinction takes on the most momentous significance. Is that not what's going on here?
    - TheDong 4y ago
      You're right that this level of pedantry isn't actually that useful. However, we're both on hacker news and thus presumably steeped in technology, which seems to turn people into pedants quite easily. I'm making the pedantic point because you're already talking specifically about tiny semantic points in this thread, and if you're going to quibble semantics, pedantry seems open. This distinction is not the one that actually matters and does not have huge significance in my frustration with blockchain advocates. To me, the large issue seems to be that people advocating for blockchain _stuff_ usually seem to be ignoring reality and trying to paint a libertarian dream that is simply entirely divorced from how real governments and societies currently function. The exact definition of blockchain doesn't matter. The use of a blockchain technology also doesn't matter (like, I don't care if my doctor is saving my records in Oracle SQL, some private blockchain, or whatever, never have cared, as long as the data is still there next time my doctor needs it, and it's compliant with legal privacy requirements). What matters is that "blockchain" always seems to be coupled with "and by using it, it will fix this social problem somehow" when that problem is inevitably social or political, not technical. I'm all for fixing these problems, but switching databases ain't it when the problem is several layers off, so it seems like at best a distraction from useful action, and at worst a grift to extract money from various entities by promising an easy solution to a difficult problem, which cannot realistically be delivered on.